Mockups for our New Interface

Here’s a first look at the new design for our Digital Collections site! Based on the blueprints from our initial wireframes, these designs include fully fleshed out HTML, CSS, images, and Javascript.

These designs focus on what we’re calling ‘portals’: useful starting pages for researchers to explore particular groups of items. These can be homepages to individual digital collections, or portals to groups of items from various collections.

We hosted a discussion session among library staff last week. I’ll capture the conversation from that session in the comments section of this post.

Mockups

Features

Branding & Navigation

Stronger ties with branding from our library website via the top brand bar. New Digital Collections logo. New primary navigation to easily browse the collections from any page.

Portal brand bar underneath can include icon, logo, colors

Search

Prominent placement.

Single search box with option to change scope to all digital collections

Advanced Search pops down options to search within particular fields

Highlighted Images

Customizable section to show highlights, further distinguish portals from each other

Can be a slideshow to show several images, a YouTube video, or other content

Tabbed Browse Box

Browse the common fields in this group of items

Browse by any letter of the alphabet

Browse categories, if exist

Blog Posts

Pull in blog posts related to this collection

Comments

Comments powered by Disqus Comments

Comment as guest, through Twitter, OpenID

Comment on others’ comments; subscribe to RSS or email for thread

Extended Footer

Links to our Research Centers

Links to Digital Collections’ accounts in social media services

Links to contact, help, about pages

Google Translate widget to auto-translate any page into another language

Most Popular

Show popular items from this group

Manually entered (for now)

Might be reworded as Highlights or Features

Goals

What’s the motivation behind the designs above? In general, we’re shooting for a way to best meet the needs of three main groups of stakeholders. Using broad strokes (see our previous blog posts for a more detailed look), they are:

1. End users/researchers: easily explore the collections & discover items of interest.
2. Library staff who sponsor & support the collections: help researchers explore and understand the collections, make the collections aesthetically pleasing, give users appropriate assistance when needed.
3. Digital Collections program staff: publish and provide access to digitized objects quickly and efficiently, provide tools for staff to manage the collections and the access points to them, maximize the discoverability and use of the collections.

What do you think of these mockups? Leave us your thoughts in the comments; we’d love to hear from you…